Woyzeck - My Directorial Concept

Sophie Barber

Themes and Aims

• Mental Stability - Visions
• Love - Heartbreak and Pain
• Hierarchy and Status
• Responsibility
• Self-worth
• Victims of Society

How do I want the audience to feel when they leave?

​I want my audience to realise that a community/society can have a huge impact on individulal lives and that there is a shared responsibility in Woyzeck's suicide.

Relevance

I know my production of Georg Büchner's Woyzeck will be relevant to a 2017 audience as a TV series with a similar message aired not long ago on the popular site Netflix. 13 Reasons Why follows the lives of a group of high school students and how their actions drove a young girl to suicide.

The show has become very popular as it shows the harsh reality of suicide amongst a young community and how so many oblivious people unknowingly played a part in the girls death. I would like my audience to see the vulnerability in the characters in my piece and know that its not just one thing that will force a person to suicide like its portrayed in a lot of media, but to focus on the small things that hugely effect someone struggling with their mental health.

...

The audience and Woyzeck...

How will I allow the audience to connect and sympathise with Woyzeck and his struggles?

Costume

Theatre Space

Set

Props

Lighting

Sound

Characterisation

Costume

For costume I will use modern day casual  clothes that are slight job specific. Each character will have a Item of clothing that represents their job or their personality. For example Woyzeck will be dressed in muted green and khaki clothing with a Beret to show his Army status. Marie on the other hand will be dressed in day to day clothing like jeans with a red top. The red will symbolise the love and pain that she will experience throughout the piece.

Theatre Space

The Almeida Theatre. 

I would showcase my production at the Almeida Theatre because of its intimacy. The theatre is small but its a very powerful space and allows the audience to connect with the piece as it is very up close and personal. I believe this theatre would be able to help send the message I want across to the audience. I would like the stage to be Thrust so the audience can see the action from different angles and feel more involved. This staging would put my aim in to full effect as it would make the audience see and feel the shared responsibility for Woyzeck's death.

Set and Props

As my production will be set in modern Britain I would want the set to be of a bare minimum, nothing too distracting for the audience. However the sky and water are mentioned a lot in Büchner's script and I would like to incorporate that in to the set. I would like to use mirrors on the back of the stage and on the ceiling to represent the reflection of the characters in water. The mirrors on the ceiling would allow light to bounce across the stage symboling stars in the night sky.

The use of props would also be at a minimum, Marie's baby is important to the piece as it allows the other characters and the audience to form a judgement of her for baring an illegitimate child. So for that matter I would chose physically represent the child in the piece through the use of props.

Lighting and Sound

I would use naturalistic lighting throughout the majority of the piece to keep the audience connected with the journey we see the characters go through. There would be no drastic lighting change as the piece starts to show the reality of the piece and that it is not a fancy production, it is more of a reflection of life and its truths. As the blood moon is mentioned multiple times in the script I would use a red gel to cast a red hue across the stage highlight the key moments.

As for music, any sound would be acapella as it can help create and change the atmosphere very easily.

Characterisation

Woyzeck - 

Fragile, Relatable, Human, Caring, Lost.

Marie - 

I would direct the actress playing Marie to touch on being both the victim and manipulator. I believe Marie is a victim of society and she uses her feminine charm as a coping mechanism, as it's the only way she believes she can as she's from a poor background. I would show Marie's journey to finding her self worth by highlighting her venerable state in sense 7 with the drum major. The use of dim lighting would force the audience to be worried for Marie despite any early judgements of her.

Key moments

Text